ash, sorrow, music: Henryk Gorecki, Symphony 3 “Sorrowful Songs”

It is a commonplace that the exilic prophets who moved captive Judah to imagine a future beyond the certain full stop that was exile in Babylonia saved the life and future of a nation. In the mix, they produced some of humankind’s most stirring poetry.

Redemptive art does not justify tragedy and does not ameliorate its dark realia. Yet it is a measure of the created world and of the human spirit that unspeakable pain somehow creates some of history’s finest words and most gripping sounds.

Enter the twentieth-century Polish composers Henryk Gorecki and his Symphony No. 3(‘Sorrowful Songs’), performed here in a stunning 1991 recording by the London Sinfonietta under the direction of David Zinman.

A widely-circulated encyclopedia of music mentions this works as ‘of singular importance to the unfolding apostmodernist aesthetic in Europe and then concludes with this shocking but indisputable verdict: ‘… some find it deeply inspiring, others find it unbearably tedious and predictable.’

Indeed. Art out of the ashes almost inevitably elicits this dualism of response.

This reviewer finds Gorecki’s most-listened-to work a masterpiece of understated, richly harmonious, soul-leveraging passion. Dawn Upshaw is magnificent in her interpretation of the work’s few, dense, pleading words.

An amateur lover of classical music, I have stumbled upon Gorecki only lately. Quickly the composer has moved to the top rank of musical creators whose product I find most capable of emotional deconstruction and at the same time generative of deep satisfaction and fresh resolve. Art does not exist for such an outcome, yet it is only the best art that produces it as a byproduct of its apprehension of beautiful things.

The landscape of Poland is no less littered with bone and ash for the existence of this symphony. Art does not ameliorate evil. Yet, it is the nature of a world in which redemption is a never-impossible and recurring surprise, that ash and bone occasionally become the soil in which something as beautiful as Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3 is born.

Evil, the exilic prophets plead with us still to understand, is penultimate.